Barrio Caminito, Buenos Aires
Instructional Technology
Today students are familiar and comfortable using technology in their everyday life experience (text messages, email, facebook, etc). I advocate the use of technology as a pedagogic tool to reach and stimulate a wide range of learning styles. The following are several examples used in my Spanish courses:
CULearn: (SPAN1020 CULearn front page)
Available to CU faculty, I use this mangement system to create an on line component of my course. tudents have acces to the Syllabus, calendar, class materials, assigments, important links, homework as well as a selective release of their grades.
CULink and CUConnect:
These resources allow me to communicate via e-mail with the class as a whole and individually with my students.
Centro: (www.mhcentro.com)
This is an instructional website with online workbooks and laboratory manuals, grammar tutorials and video programs in Spanish. The students' workstation has a display with dated assigned excercises, some of them self-corrected
Voicethread: (www.voicethread.com)
Voicethread is a web base tool that allows students to record audio comments related to a digital picture to be shared with classmates and the instructor. Students listen to each others' recordings and add their comments, all in Spanish.
By introducing Voicethrad to my students I try to inspire them to use spontaneous commnets and everyday conversational language from inside a classroom or from their own homes. We brainstorm about topics they would like to talk about, then each student posts a picture and records an explanatory comment. Students enjoy this resource that allows them to hear their own voices in Spanish.
Students create 4 Voicethreads each semester as a graded activity. The requirement is to record a comment on their own picture and at least four in other classmate's postings. Then each student types a paragraph in their own picture that becames a rough draft for a composition.
I have found Voicethread an enjoyable tool for language acquisition that could be very easily tailored to the student's interests and personal styles.
Powerpoints:
Students create powerpoints to facilitate and complement their oral presentations on their Spanish culture research projects.
Websites:
To introduce each unit vocabulary students take virtual visits to food, clothes stores, museums, foreign campus, restaurants, weather stations,etc., from different spanish countries. My classes use the university's ALTEC computer lab every two weeks to introduce the students to these web resources.